You Told Me This Would Be Simple
by WritingAmateur
Summary: Napoleon-centric. Napoleon does what he has to for each job, but it doesn't mean he has to like it. Even when he does like it.


There's a name for what Napoleon Solo does. His role in each and every mission Saunders lays out before him, that smug nasal voice of his gleefully aware of how much it _burns_ Solo to have to play along like this.

 _Honeypot._

The moment he'd laid eyes on Victoria Vinciguerra's photograph, he'd known what his role in this little operation was going to be. Same as it always was—and Saunders had all but confirmed it when he'd given him his cover. _Jack Daubigney, antiquities dealer_.

He'd have to fuck her.

In some way or another, he'd have to lay on the charm, the twinkly eyes that could slip from dashingly cavalier to sultry and bedroom in the time it took to slip off a silk tie, that drop in his voice that had worked every single time he'd needed it to—

Victoria Vinciguerra had known what would transpire the moment she'd laid eyes on him. Victoria Vinciguerra could not have gotten to where she is today if she were a fool.

"We can talk about filling in my… _gaps."_

A foregone conclusion that Saunders must surely have accounted for, as he always has.

And of course, adrenaline running in his veins after leaping off the moped, dashing up several flights of stairs, and slipping into his room only moments before she does, he does his job.

"I gave it everything I had. _Believe me."_

He doesn't want it, until he does.

His body is not his own.

It's not that he doesn't _enjoy_ sex. Of course he does—a little too much, if he's entirely honest with himself. He wishes he could say it's because he's so cynical, so hardened by the war, that the only source of sensation he can register is the feel of bodies pressed against his own. Like the hotel manager. That lovely woman with the nervous, radiant smile and the exceptional rear end. Five minutes turns into several hours, and it's not enough.

Victoria Vinciguerra is no different. He knows what to do—where to touch, where to stroke, tease, kiss, where flesh turns to silk beneath his hands, until both of their jeweled artificialities shiver away into pure physical response. Between the sheets, it doesn't matter that she's bloodthirsty and conniving. Doesn't matter that his goals are in direct opposition to hers.

In a job that requires endless lies upon lies, doing this is the only thing that feels _real._

It's numbing. It's like forgetting.

"Your balls are on the end of a very long leash, held by a very short man."

—Anything to forget what Illya had so accurately picked out among the bluster, the smarminess.

Envy is not the word he feels when he sees the way Illya looks at her. At Gaby. Like she's this tiny, impossibly precious thing that Illya would jump in front of a damned tank to protect. Would lay down his life. Without question. This frightening creature, the Red Peril, brought to his knees by a chop-shop girl. It's so naked of him—Illya, for all his talents, cannot hide his emotions any more than he can hide that thick accent of his.

Napoleon wonders what that feels like. That desire for someone that goes so far beyond what two bodies can do to one another.

There'd been a young Napoleon Solo who dreamed of love. He is sure of it. Before the war, before the bespoke suits and the disarming smile. The boy whose mother insisted on calling him "Napoleon," despite his best efforts to dissuade her.

He wonders where that boy went. If he's not in there somewhere, sentimentally buried under years of pseudonyms and boundless hedonism. Somewhere Napoleon doesn't know how to reach. Doesn't know if he wants to know how to reach.

If it's not the boy who feels strange when he sees Illya and Gaby together, the way they arch towards each other as if uncontrollably drawn to one another, then he doesn't know who it is. Because he isn't going to think this way. Not in this line of work. Better to sip his champagne and watch the world turn around him, content to watch the spectacle without participating.


End file.
